Some individuals have jobs that are characterized by sporadic periods of availability intermixed with substantial periods of unavailability. A doctor is an example of such an individual. On a typical day, a doctor's calendar may include nearly back-to-meetings (i.e., appointments) with patients, during which the doctor is generally unavailable to receive or respond to messages from other individuals. There is typically only a very short period of time between appointments. Consequently, it may be difficult for a doctor to respond to messages until the end of the workday, after her last appointment, at which time those seeking the doctor's response may not be available. Unfortunately, this delay results in further delays for those awaiting a response from the doctor, such as other doctors seeking the doctor's thoughts or advice on a matter, or can result in patient dissatisfaction in the event that a patient has to wait all day until he hears from the doctor.
Sometimes doctors have access to an open messaging environment, such as an email system, that allows individuals to send emails to the doctor, to which the doctor can respond. However, it is difficult to keep email addresses truly private, and over time most email inboxes become cluttered with wanted as well as unwanted messages, making it difficult for a doctor to quickly separate wanted emails from unwanted emails. An open messaging environment therefore may not be suitable for the delivery of time-critical messages.
Sometimes a doctor may arrange to have another individual attempt to receive and prioritize messages for the doctor so that the doctor can access messages on a prioritized basis in between appointments. However, prioritizing messages can be difficult. Messages having the same subject matter may have different priorities based on different underlying circumstances that may or may not be apparent from the text of the messages themselves. For example, different senders of similar messages may have widely different perspectives on their messages' urgency, which may affect how quickly they expect a response. A sender's perspective on the urgency of a message may affect how quickly the recipient doctor responds to the message, but it can be difficult or impossible to ascertain from the message itself. Moreover, without a suitable medical background, the individual prioritizing the messages for the doctor may not be able to prioritize the subject matter of the messages in an appropriate manner. Consequently, in between appointments the doctor may be handed numerous messages that require responses, only a few of which she has time to answer immediately, with little guidance as to which of the messages should be responded to first.
It would be beneficial for the doctor to be provided with a very limited number of the most important messages from her message queue, so that the doctor could ensure that her limited time was focused on only those messages which are most critical.
Accordingly, what is needed is a messaging system that automatically prioritizes messages in accordance with various criteria, including criteria designated by the recipient as well as criteria designated by the sender, and which presents the messages on a metered basis to an individual for processing, so that a limited number of the most important messages can be processed on a prioritized basis.